The twelve signs of the Zodiac for the standards of the twelve tribes of Israel, the scorpion or typhon, the devil or the emblem of destruction, being changed for the eagle by the tribe of Dan, to whom it was allotted; the ark, an exact copy of the ark of Osiris, set afloat in the Nile every year, and supposed to sail to Biblos, in Palestine; the pillars Joachim and Boaz; the festival of the Passover at the vernal equinox, an exact copy of the Egyptian festival at the same time; almost all the ornaments of the temple, altar, priest, &c., all these are clearly astrological. The secret meaning of all these emblems, and of most parts of the books of the Pentateuch, of Joshua and Judges, (almost the whole of which was astrological, that is, magical allegory,) was what in old times, in part at least, constituted the Jewish Cabala, and was studiously kept from the knowledge of the vulgar. There is no reason to believe that the Cabala of the modern Jews has any similitude to that of the ancients. The childish nonsense of the modern Cabalists, it would indeed be very absurd to attribute to the sages, who, on Carmel, taught Pythagoras the true system of the planetary bodies—or to Elias, whose knowledge of chemistry, perhaps, taught him to outmanœuvre the priests of Baal.
On the subject of the reason why Abraham or his tribe left his or its home, I shall have much more to say in the course of this work, when I flatter myself that that, and many other things on which I slightly touch here, will be accounted for.
CHAPTER V.
CHARACTER OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.—NATURE OF THE ALLEGORY IN GENESIS.
1. The reader will now perhaps ask, What in the result is the truth respecting the Old Testament? It is very difficult to answer this question in a few words. Is it the produce of deep learning and profound wisdom, hidden under the veil of allegory, or is it the mere literal history of transactions of past events, as believed by the Christians and modern Jews? It is probably both: a collection of tracts mixed up with traditions, histories or rumours of events, collected together by the priests of an ignorant, uncivilized race of shepherds, intermixed also with the allegories and fictions in which the ancient philosophers of the eastern nations veiled their learning from the eyes of the vulgar. The Pentateuch is evidently a collection of different mythological histories of the creation, and of the transactions of Moses, the chief of a tribe of wandering Arabs, who was believed to have brought this tribe from the borders of Egypt and to have conquered Palestine: and there is little doubt that it contains a considerable portion of truth. The priests of the hilly part of Judea, after the tribes had united under one government, wanting something whereon to found their system, collected from all quarters the different parts, connecting them together as well as they could, though very unskilfully. And this was probably not all done at once, but by degrees, without any regular preconcerted design. The only part of it which shews any thing like a regular system, is the invariable tendency evident in every page to support the power of the priests or prophets. And this inay perhaps be attributed more to a natural effect, arising from the manufacture of the work by priests, than to design.
The treatises in the Pentateuch are put together, or connected with one another, in so very awkward and unskilful a manner, that they would have passed as the work of one person with
